opening was of course left for a door, although many a cabin was
built without a window, and when the door was shut received no light
save that which came down the chimney, which was always on the outside
of the house. To form it, an opening eight feet long and six feet high
was left at one end of the house, and around this a sort of bay window
was built of logs and lined with stones on the inside. Above the top of
the opening the chimney contracted and was made of branches smeared both
inside and out with clay. Generally the chimney went to the peak of the
roof; but it was by no means unusual for it to stop about halfway up the
end of the cabin.

[Illustration: Log cabin[1]]

[Footnote 1: The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, restored (reproduced,
together with the first picture on the next page, from Tarbell's _Early
Life of Abraham Lincoln_, by permission of the publishers, S.S.
McClure, Limited).]

If the settler was too poor to buy glass, or if glass could not be had,
the window frame was covered with greased paper, which let in the light
but could not be seen through. The door was of plank with leather
hinges, or with iron hinges made from an old wagon tire by the nearest
blacksmith or by the settler himself. There was no knob, no lock,
no bolt.

In place of them there was a wooden latch on the inside, which could be
lifted by a person on the outside of the door by a leather strip which
came through a hole in the door and hung down. When this latch string
was out, anybody could pull it, lift the latch, and come in. When it was
drawn inside, nobody could come in without knocking. The floor was made
of "puncheons," or planks split and hewn with an ax from the trunk of a
tree, and laid with the round side down. The furniture the settler
brought with him, or made on the spot.

[Illustration: Hand mill [1]]

The household utensils were of the simplest kind. Brooms and brushes
were made of corn husks. Corn was shelled by hand and was then either
carried in a bag slung over a horse's back to the nearest mill, perhaps
fifteen miles away, or was pounded in a wooden hominy mortar with a
wooden pestle, or ground in a hand mill. Chickens and game were roasted
by hanging them with leather strings before the open fire. Cooking
stoves were unknown, and all cooking was done in a "Dutch oven," on the
hearth, or in a clay "out oven" built, as its name implies, out
of doors.

[Illustration: Corn-husk broom [1]]

[Illustrati